How to Earn More Customers by Improving Customer Experience
No matter your industry or clientele, your customer experience is crucial. Whether you serve a B2B or B2C market, you need to ensure you offer an engaging, helpful and consistent experience. Your earnings will ultimately reflect that experience, for better or worse.
If you can improve your customer experience, you can boost new customer acquisition. Here’s a closer look at five high-impact ways to make a significant change.
How Does Customer Experience Impact Acquisition?
When most people talk about the benefits of better customer experiences, they focus on retention. After all, it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one. You’ll improve retention by offering a better experience, but it can also help you gain new customers as well.
Acquiring new clients may be more expensive than retaining them, but if you’re not doing it, you’re not growing. Since providing a better customer experience improves both, you can attract new clientele without incurring the high costs of customer churn.
While your customers won’t know for sure what your experience is like before trying your product, it still affects their buying decision. Here’s how.
Inspiring Word-of-Mouth Marketing
The most impactful way that customer experiences affect acquisition is through word-of-mouth marketing. Referrals and testimonials from other customers are some of the most effective tools you have in appealing to potential buyers. They’re how Tesla managed to generate more than 40x ROI with $0 in their marketing budget.
When your customers have a positive experience, they’ll likely tell other people about it. They can post reviews on your website that prospective buyers will see or, more importantly, tell people they know. Since 93% of people trust recommendations from friends and family, these testimonials do a lot to bring you new customers.
After impressing users with an excellent experience, you can capitalize on word-of-mouth marketing through various ways, including:
- Referral programs with GrowSurf
- Brand ambassador programs
- User-generated content
- Satisfaction surveys
Establishing Trust
A better customer experience will also help you establish trust among your target market. When users aren’t satisfied with your service, they’ll stop using it, likely even turning to a competitor. This customer churn is expensive and harms your reputation.
While potential buyers can’t see all the data about your churn levels, they may see how long people use your service. If they notice most of the reviews are from people who haven’t used it long, they may not trust it. In contrast, seeing that people stick with you for a long time helps them trust that you offer what you promise.
In this way, better retention leads to higher acquisition rates. By improving one with better customer experiences, you improve the other.
Standing Out From Competitors
Offering a competitive customer experience will also help you stand out from the crowd. Subscription markets are crowded. There are more than 15,000 SaaS companies in the U.S. alone, so there’s a good chance someone offers a similar product to yours. In such a sea of similar products, customer service can be the key differentiator.
Imagine you and a competitor both serve the same market niche with a similar product for a similar price. You likely have unique features that set you apart, but these may be less obvious or less convincing to a potential client. But if you have a track record of excellent customer service, that could be what the buyer needs to choose you over the competitor.
Studies show that 96% of customers today will leave a company because of poor customer service. Similarly, most will pay more for good service. The customer experience matters to buyers more than most factors, making it a strong marketing tool.
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5 Customer Experience Changes to Boost Acquisition
Clearly, refining your customer experience can be a considerable help in boosting acquisition. It doesn’t help you much to only know that better experiences lead to higher acquisition rates, though. You also need to know how to improve this aspect of your business.
No one wants to create a poor customer experience, but how to create a positive one isn’t always clear. It starts with an understanding of what your clientele expects today. Customer preferences constantly shift in both B2B and B2C markets, so what makes a great customer experience can also change.
Here are five changes you can make to appeal to today’s markets and foster a better customer experience.
1. Personalize the User Experience
One of the most important changes to make to customer experiences is to personalize them. The Apple Watch has managed to compete with Rolex, thanks largely to its extensive customization options. Studies also show that 80% of consumers today are more likely to do business with a company offering personalized experiences.
Subscription-based services provide the perfect vehicle for customization, too. You can look at how users interact with your services to get a better idea of what their preferences are. This data gives you the information you need to tailor the experience to fit how they use your platform.
Personalization can be as small as recommended products or as in-depth as automating routine steps based on users’ past behavior. If you can anticipate and provide what users want, the service will be far more convenient. They’ll then be more likely to recommend it to others.
2. Support Omnichannel Experiences
Another crucial aspect of customer experiences today is consistency across multiple channels. Whether your customers are in commercial or consumer markets, they likely use multiple means to interact with your services. Providing a cohesive and connected experience across all of these platforms will impress your users.
Streaming platforms, which have mastered this practice, are an excellent example of why this matters. People stream videos fairly evenly across different devices, including:
- 58% watching on TV
- 52% on computers
- 43% on mobile
- 34% on a tablet
- 12% on a video game console
There’s significant overlap there, so streaming services must update preferences and history across all platforms.
When a user accesses your services from their phone, they should be able to pick up exactly where they left off on their computer. If they can’t, they may think your product is inconvenient, especially compared to what they’re used to.
3. Support Various User Behaviors
Along those same lines, you should support multiple ways of using your product to account for varying preferences. The most successful grocery retailers noticed online grocery delivery becoming increasingly popular and implemented mobile ordering apps to accommodate it. The same principle applies to companies in other industries, too.
For example, 40% of B2B buyers want to buy, track, and manage their orders online. That’s too significant an amount to ignore, but only catering to online orders will leave out 60% of the market. You need to provide for both online and offline order management to ensure everyone has the customer experience they want.
Even in a niche market, every user is unique in what they want from you. Offering multiple options to support various user behaviors appeals to a wider audience, making great customer experiences common across your entire user base.
4. Be Transparent
A more easily overlookable but still important part of customer experiences is transparency. Customers, especially in B2B markets, want to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Users don’t need to know all the technical details of your service but should be able to see things like:
- How you use their data
- How to manage permissions
- How the customer service process works
- If they’re talking to a real person or a chatbot
- How making some changes will affect the rest of their experience
The more users know about your service and how it works, the more manageable it becomes. Transparency improves usability, which is a massive concern for customers today. Considering that 50% of SaaS users say software is difficult to use at first, there’s also plenty of room to grow.
Transparency solves this issue by giving users more information about what they’re doing and how it impacts other processes. If nothing else, they’ll appreciate the availability of information, making them more likely to recommend you.
5. Make Feedback and Support Easy and Available
Customer service is one of the most important aspects of the customer experience. When users have a question, they should receive a quick, informative answer. This can quickly turn frustration into relief, leaving customers with a positive impression, while the opposite can make things worse.
Chatbots can make support available 24/7, making it easier for customers to get the help they need. It should also be clear where they can access these tools to streamline the process. You can even have chatbots pop up automatically to ask if users need assistance.
You should also create customer satisfaction surveys and encourage users to fill them out. This will show that you care about your users, plus it gives you data about where you may need to improve. As with other customer service processes, these should be straightforward and quick.
Better Customer Service Pays Off
Every business has unique challenges and opportunities, but no one can afford to ignore the value of good customer experiences. If you follow these steps, you can create experiences your users will want to tell others about. You can then turn to GrowSurf for help capitalizing on that opportunity.
Build your customer referral program without the dev time
Sign up for a free trial of GrowSurf to lower your customer acquisition costs, increase customer loyalty, and save gobs of time.
